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May 6, 2022
The turnaway study: Longitudinal study of the denial of abortion rights.
It was referenced in this weeks Nature.
The Turnaway Study
The Turnaway Study is ANSIRH’s prospective longitudinal study examining the effects of unwanted pregnancy on women’s lives. The major aim of the study is to describe the mental health, physical health, and socioeconomic consequences of receiving an abortion compared to carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. The main finding of The Turnaway Study is that receiving an abortion does not harm the health and wellbeing of women, but in fact, being denied an abortion results in worse financial, health and family outcomes. Highlighted resources include:
Factsheet: The Harms of Denying a Woman a Wanted Abortion
A Summary of Publications on The Turnaway Study
What is The Turnaway Study?
The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, A Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having - or Being Denied - an Abortion
Before the Turnaway Study, there was little quality research on the physical and social consequences of unwanted pregnancy for women. Most of the research that did exist focused on whether abortion causes mental health problems such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, or alcohol and drug use. That body of work often used inappropriate comparisons groups—comparing, for example, women who obtain abortions with those who continue their pregnancies to term by choice—and used retrospective designs that depended on women’s reporting of pregnancies and abortions in hindsight. Such comparisons are inherently biased and paint a distorted picture of life following an elective abortion or pregnancy continuation.
Factsheet: The Harms of Denying a Woman a Wanted Abortion
A Summary of Publications on The Turnaway Study
What is The Turnaway Study?
The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, A Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having - or Being Denied - an Abortion
Before the Turnaway Study, there was little quality research on the physical and social consequences of unwanted pregnancy for women. Most of the research that did exist focused on whether abortion causes mental health problems such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, or alcohol and drug use. That body of work often used inappropriate comparisons groups—comparing, for example, women who obtain abortions with those who continue their pregnancies to term by choice—and used retrospective designs that depended on women’s reporting of pregnancies and abortions in hindsight. Such comparisons are inherently biased and paint a distorted picture of life following an elective abortion or pregnancy continuation.
May 5, 2022
Diane Green Foster, Nature, November 16, 2021.
I believe it's open sourced, but here are some excerpts:
Yes, science can weigh in on abortion law.
This is a "World View" article in Nature. It dates before the reactionary decision about to be announced by the Taliban dominated Supreme Court that was politicized by the racist sexist thug McConnell enabled by liars including Susan Collins.
Yes, science can weigh in on abortion law
Subtitle:
Why, as a scientist, I signed an amicus brief for the US Supreme Court’s case on abortion.
Diane Green Foster, Nature, November 16, 2021.
I believe it's open sourced, but here are some excerpts:
The world is moving towards greater reproductive rights for women. More than 50 countries have liberalized their abortion laws in the past 25 years, informed by scientific research. Studies find that unsafe abortion is responsible for one in eight maternal deaths globally (E. Ahman and I. H. Shah Int. J. Gynaecol. Obstet. 115, 121–126; 2011), concentrated in low-income countries where abortion is illegal. Preventing unsafe abortion is a priority — 193 countries signed up to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which call for reductions in maternal mortality.
Yet some countries, such as the United States, Poland and Nicaragua, are making access to abortion more difficult. Restrictions are passed on the basis of ideology or political motives, without considering scientific evidence about their impact. Science might not be able to decide philosophical questions about when life begins or when the rights of a fetus outweigh the agency of the person whose body is necessary for its growth and development. But it can tell us how access to abortion is affected by its legal status, and about the consequences when abortion is inaccessible. Science should weigh in on the often quoted yet seldom tested slogans of the abortion debate, because people’s well-being is at stake.
Consider this argument: ‘One cannot ban abortion; one can only ban safe abortion.’ This can be tested. When abortion is illegal, pregnant people are more likely to resort to unsafe methods. But some circumvent the law in ways that are safe. Those with the means travel to places where abortion is legal, and others take safe medications, approved by the World Health Organization, to terminate their pregnancies outside the formal health system. In Latin America, where self-managed abortion is widespread, large decreases in mortality from unsafe abortion have been documented without widespread changes to restrictive abortion laws (see go.nature.com/3d6gspd).
But there’s another consequence that should be investigated — when people are unable to get a legal abortion, they are more likely to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. It is estimated that 70% of unintended pregnancies end in abortion in places where it is legal, compared with about 50% where it is not (J. Bearak et al. Lancet Glob. Health 8, E1152–E1161; 2020). I am a demographer who gathers data and creates quantitative models to assess how unintended pregnancies affect the well-being of women, children and families. My work shows that there are serious ramifications.
Most of my evidence is drawn from the Turnaway Study, which I led. My team and I followed almost 1,000 women for five years after they sought an abortion in the United States, comparing the health and socio-economic consequences of receiving an abortion or being denied one. We found serious physical health consequences from continued pregnancy and childbirth, including death. Women and their existing and subsequent children also experienced greater economic and other hardship when abortion was denied. Women were more likely to continue to be exposed to intimate-partner violence, less likely to have an intended pregnancy under better circumstances later, and less likely to achieve their own aspirations...
... Studies in other countries where abortion is legal — Colombia, Tunisia, South Africa and Nepal — have found that many women are turned away because of difficulties including a lack of trained clinicians and low knowledge of the law. Some get an abortion outside the legal system, sometimes with serious medical complications. Others plan to carry the pregnancy to term, and anticipate hardships. A woman in Tunisia remarked that she did not have clothes for a newborn. “Four children, and a fifth one on top! Where are we heading this way? Poverty and tyranny” (S. Hajri et al. PLoS ONE 10, e0145338; 2015). An 18-year-old in Colombia who would not be able to continue her studies once she had a baby said: “I will no longer be able to be young” (T. DePiñeres et al. Reprod. Health 14, 133; 2017).
There is much more science to be done on abortion access. What is the impact of gestational limits? Who crosses borders to get care? What information, support and services help people to use abortion medications safely...
Yet some countries, such as the United States, Poland and Nicaragua, are making access to abortion more difficult. Restrictions are passed on the basis of ideology or political motives, without considering scientific evidence about their impact. Science might not be able to decide philosophical questions about when life begins or when the rights of a fetus outweigh the agency of the person whose body is necessary for its growth and development. But it can tell us how access to abortion is affected by its legal status, and about the consequences when abortion is inaccessible. Science should weigh in on the often quoted yet seldom tested slogans of the abortion debate, because people’s well-being is at stake.
Consider this argument: ‘One cannot ban abortion; one can only ban safe abortion.’ This can be tested. When abortion is illegal, pregnant people are more likely to resort to unsafe methods. But some circumvent the law in ways that are safe. Those with the means travel to places where abortion is legal, and others take safe medications, approved by the World Health Organization, to terminate their pregnancies outside the formal health system. In Latin America, where self-managed abortion is widespread, large decreases in mortality from unsafe abortion have been documented without widespread changes to restrictive abortion laws (see go.nature.com/3d6gspd).
But there’s another consequence that should be investigated — when people are unable to get a legal abortion, they are more likely to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. It is estimated that 70% of unintended pregnancies end in abortion in places where it is legal, compared with about 50% where it is not (J. Bearak et al. Lancet Glob. Health 8, E1152–E1161; 2020). I am a demographer who gathers data and creates quantitative models to assess how unintended pregnancies affect the well-being of women, children and families. My work shows that there are serious ramifications.
Most of my evidence is drawn from the Turnaway Study, which I led. My team and I followed almost 1,000 women for five years after they sought an abortion in the United States, comparing the health and socio-economic consequences of receiving an abortion or being denied one. We found serious physical health consequences from continued pregnancy and childbirth, including death. Women and their existing and subsequent children also experienced greater economic and other hardship when abortion was denied. Women were more likely to continue to be exposed to intimate-partner violence, less likely to have an intended pregnancy under better circumstances later, and less likely to achieve their own aspirations...
... Studies in other countries where abortion is legal — Colombia, Tunisia, South Africa and Nepal — have found that many women are turned away because of difficulties including a lack of trained clinicians and low knowledge of the law. Some get an abortion outside the legal system, sometimes with serious medical complications. Others plan to carry the pregnancy to term, and anticipate hardships. A woman in Tunisia remarked that she did not have clothes for a newborn. “Four children, and a fifth one on top! Where are we heading this way? Poverty and tyranny” (S. Hajri et al. PLoS ONE 10, e0145338; 2015). An 18-year-old in Colombia who would not be able to continue her studies once she had a baby said: “I will no longer be able to be young” (T. DePiñeres et al. Reprod. Health 14, 133; 2017).
There is much more science to be done on abortion access. What is the impact of gestational limits? Who crosses borders to get care? What information, support and services help people to use abortion medications safely...
May 5, 2022
I have time to post only one graphic from the article, a graphic on the mechanism:
The caption:
The products are lactate - utilized in certain biopolymers used widely in medical applications - formate and dihydroxyacetone (which rearranges to give lactate.)
Cool paper. Like I said, I like transfer hydrogenations.
Ruthenium is a relatively rare and expensive metal, but it can be recovered from used nuclear fuel in significant quantities as it is a prominent fission product. Zirconium, the support, which is less rare is also a fission product as well as a widely used structural component of nuclear reactors.
File for "very long term," zircon supported catalysts for the transfer hydrogenation of bicarbonate.
In general, I oppose biofuels because of the massive destruction of critical ecosystems, as I remarked recently in a post here: The Very Stable Genius of Biofuels.
Nevertheless, they exist and in one case, the case of biodiesel, they have led to a glut of the simplest triol glycerol.
It does seem to me that algal biodiesel might have some potential to be marginally sustainable, possibly as a side product, as a tool to recover phosphorous from eutrophic zones, particularly in the case where waste or deliberate heat was sustainably available. In this more sustainable case, glycerol would still represent a glut.
I'm not going to spend very much time at all on the paper I'll reference here, if for no other reason that transfer hydrogenations have always struck me as cool. Here it is: Ru/ZrO2 as a Facile and Efficient Heterogeneous Catalyst for the Catalytic Hydrogenation of Bicarbonate Using Biodiesel-Waste Glycerol as a Hydrogen Donor Wubin Yan, Binbin Jin, Jiong Cheng, Xiaoyu Shi, Heng Zhong, and Fangming Jin ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2022 10 (17), 5374-5383.
This brief note is a placeholder, should it ever be possible to make sustainable biodiesel - it will never be as clean a diesel fuel as DME but it may have a role to increase lubricity - something which is currently not viable from an environmental standpoint.
From the introduction to the paper:
Global warming related to excessive CO2 emission is a major problem threatening the development of human society. (1) Therefore, how to reduce the concentration of CO2 has become a matter of great concern. In addition to adopting low-carbon technologies to reduce CO2 emission from the source, (2,3) converting CO2 (or HCO3–) into value added products is also a promising strategy, and thermochemical hydrogenation of CO2 is the most widely investigated method among the developed technologies. However, traditional hydrogenation of CO2 is commonly accompanied with a large consumption amount of additional hydrogen, which is still highly dependent on the fossil fuels reforming for molecular hydrogen production.
Recently, hydrogenation of CO2 using biomass as the hydrogen donor emerged as a novel method. (4,5) Compared to the traditional hydrogenation process, this indirect hydrogenation strategy could achieve desirable CO2 conversion with a promising carbon-negative effect by making full use of renewable and naturally abundant biomass as the reductant. (6) Our group has investigated the hydrogenation of HCO3– into formate under hydrothermal conditions by using the glycerol as a green hydrogen source instead of gaseous hydrogen. (7) As a main side product of the biodiesel manufacturing, glycerol has been applied as an attractive bio-based platform substrate to the production of high-value chemicals. (8) Hydrogenation of HCO3– with glycerol shows an advantage on thermodynamics because glycerol can significantly lower the ?Gaq? for the hydrogenation of HCO3– compared with the direct hydrogenation. (9,10) In addition to providing hydrogen for HCO3– hydrogenation, the glycerol itself can be converted into lactic acid, achieving the synergistic conversion of glycerol and HCO3–. However, the quite limited conversion efficiency urges us to search for suitable catalysts.
Homogeneous catalysts, such as water-soluble iridium N-heterocyclic carbene catalysts, have been studied for the reduction of HCO3– with the participation of glycerol. (9) Although homogeneous catalysts can achieve a relatively high TOF value, the difficulties in separating and recovering them from the reaction system limit their application. Additionally, the stability of these homogeneous catalysts at a high reaction temperature is also one limit. By contrast, heterogeneous supported catalysts may be more desirable due to their better recoverability and stability. To strip hydrogen from the biomass and transfer hydrogen from biomass to active sites, the capacity of enhancing the hydrogen transfer in the whole conversion process is crucial for the catalyst to achieve efficient CO2 conversion using biomass as the reductant. Considering the significant advantages of noble metal in hydrogenation and dehydrogenation, noble metals were selected as the active components for the target catalyst...
Recently, hydrogenation of CO2 using biomass as the hydrogen donor emerged as a novel method. (4,5) Compared to the traditional hydrogenation process, this indirect hydrogenation strategy could achieve desirable CO2 conversion with a promising carbon-negative effect by making full use of renewable and naturally abundant biomass as the reductant. (6) Our group has investigated the hydrogenation of HCO3– into formate under hydrothermal conditions by using the glycerol as a green hydrogen source instead of gaseous hydrogen. (7) As a main side product of the biodiesel manufacturing, glycerol has been applied as an attractive bio-based platform substrate to the production of high-value chemicals. (8) Hydrogenation of HCO3– with glycerol shows an advantage on thermodynamics because glycerol can significantly lower the ?Gaq? for the hydrogenation of HCO3– compared with the direct hydrogenation. (9,10) In addition to providing hydrogen for HCO3– hydrogenation, the glycerol itself can be converted into lactic acid, achieving the synergistic conversion of glycerol and HCO3–. However, the quite limited conversion efficiency urges us to search for suitable catalysts.
Homogeneous catalysts, such as water-soluble iridium N-heterocyclic carbene catalysts, have been studied for the reduction of HCO3– with the participation of glycerol. (9) Although homogeneous catalysts can achieve a relatively high TOF value, the difficulties in separating and recovering them from the reaction system limit their application. Additionally, the stability of these homogeneous catalysts at a high reaction temperature is also one limit. By contrast, heterogeneous supported catalysts may be more desirable due to their better recoverability and stability. To strip hydrogen from the biomass and transfer hydrogen from biomass to active sites, the capacity of enhancing the hydrogen transfer in the whole conversion process is crucial for the catalyst to achieve efficient CO2 conversion using biomass as the reductant. Considering the significant advantages of noble metal in hydrogenation and dehydrogenation, noble metals were selected as the active components for the target catalyst...
I have time to post only one graphic from the article, a graphic on the mechanism:
The caption:
Figure 6. Proposed reaction mechanisms of (a) the dehydrogenation of glycerol over the Ru/ZrO2 catalyst, (b) the hydrogenation of bicarbonate over the Ru/ZrO2 catalyst, and (c) the production of lactate from C3 intermediates.
The products are lactate - utilized in certain biopolymers used widely in medical applications - formate and dihydroxyacetone (which rearranges to give lactate.)
Cool paper. Like I said, I like transfer hydrogenations.
Ruthenium is a relatively rare and expensive metal, but it can be recovered from used nuclear fuel in significant quantities as it is a prominent fission product. Zirconium, the support, which is less rare is also a fission product as well as a widely used structural component of nuclear reactors.
May 3, 2022
I also know precisely, because I look how much the delusional "renewable energy will save us" scam costs, because I cared enough to look.
Again, a standard referenced response to pabulum:
Here's what we have to show for it, from the 2021 issue of the International Energy Agency's Annual World Energy Outlook:
Source: IEA World Energy Outlook, 2021, page 294, Table A1A
I don't know what any of the other members of my awful generation have been doing with their lives, but I spent at least 50 years hearing how wind and solar would save the world. I even used to believe that crap, but I'm done. I work as opposed to chanting 50 year old mantras about the sun and the wind.
What part of 10.4 Exajoules for all the solar and wind facilities on the entire planet, this out of 589 Exajoules consumed by humanity (in a Covid year) after trillions of dollars and decades of mindless chanting, is difficult to understand?
At the awful risk of hearing how noble some old person declares himself because he didn't have children, I do have to look the next generation in the eye. It is not an option for me to fade away in an orgy of self-congratulation.
I give a shit that close to 2 billion people - human beings - on this planet lack basic sanitation while we squander trillions of dollars on so called "renewable energy," tearing the shit out of the pristine wilderness to convert it to industrial parks for wind turbines, all because bourgeois types don't bother to either think or read and/or because these same types think their responsibility ends with repeating popular pabulum.
Excuse me if I am unimpressed with and refuse to acknowlege a demand that I, who has worked and continues to work through challenging issues in the environment, engineering, chemistry, and physics to understand this situation, should just shut up.
I have a right to say what I say and I have a right to criticize the critic if the critic is talking out of his or her ass. I worked for that right. I still work for it. I'm not picking flowers at a retirement home. I'm thinking about the situation with respect to this planet to the last breath, because I give a shit.
OK?
Ted Cruz doesn't get the right to tell anyone to shut up and that what he says cannot be criticized; nor does Donnie Trump; nor does Gym Jordan. Neither do any posters here get to tell me to shut up about topics about which they clearly know nothing at all.
Rather than cheer for unsustainable so called "renewable energy" one could open a science book, or a science paper, if not those I read and link, than some the find for themselves (were they to care). Hell, why not read the news sections at Nature or Science?
Under these circumstances, one could begin, merely begin, the competence to have "doubts" about what other people do and do not know, not that I find these "doubts," to be anything than Dunning Kruger type arrogance:
828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels
As for me, again my journal here speaks for itself. I don't merely pull stuff out of my ass; I produce references and think critically about what's in them.
I work.
Perhaps some of the cheerleaders here for the electric car/wind/solar/gas/coal/petroleum industry, including the connected fantasies, should try it out. They might learn something, but somehow I don't think they're entirely interested in doing so.
It shows.
Have a nice evening.
It's not "too complex" if one studies the issue, if one cares, if one works.
I've spent more than 30 years investing many hours a week, generally 20 to 30 a week, sometimes more, sometimes less, considering the issue of climate change and my journal here is filled with references to the primary scientific literature on issues in Energy and the environment and a number of other scientific topics.
The work herein, utilizing and expanding my scientific knowledge, is considerably broader than what someone who sits around talking about the joys of retirement is competent to judge.
I don't care if lazy people "doubt" my work on energy and the environment. I do it because I give a shit about the planet being left by my awful generation. I don't do it to impress bloggers.
I doubt that a person making this kind of weak criticism, laced with an imperious statement of absurd "doubt" has ever opened an issue of any of the many hundreds, if not thousands, of journals I've accessed or took a look at the papers from the primary scientific literature I've referenced and excerpted with graphics here.
One can look at what one posts here, a person's journal, and understand a great deal about who they are, who they aren't, and what is important to them, if anything is important to them.
No one here has a right to tell me whether I have a right to disagree with "ideas" that seriously wound the planet, so smug suggestions about what I can and cannot say don't wash with me.
Again, we spent trillions of dollars on solar and wind and yet millions of people die each year because they have proved useless to addressing climate change, and useless at addressing the health costs of energy. Ignorance is not neutral. It kills people. My standard reference here to the fact that 7 million people die each year from air pollution...
:...is here: Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.
Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:
Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:
The top five risks for attributable deaths for females were high SBP (5·25 million [95% UI 4·49–6·00] deaths, or 20·3% [17·5–22·9] of all female deaths in 2019), dietary risks (3·48 million [2·78–4·37] deaths, or 13·5% [10·8–16·7] of all female deaths in 2019), high FPG (3·09 million [2·40–3·98] deaths, or 11·9% [9·4–15·3] of all female deaths in 2019), air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019), and high BMI (2·54 million [1·68–3·56] deaths or 9·8% [6·5–13·7] of all female deaths in 2019). For males, the top five risks differed slightly. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths globally in males was tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 6·56 million (95% UI 6·02–7·10) deaths (21·4% [20·5–22·3] of all male deaths in 2019), followed by high SBP, which accounted for 5·60 million (4·90–6·29) deaths (18·2% [16·2–20·1] of all male deaths in 2019). The third largest Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths among males in 2019 was dietary risks (4·47 million [3·65–5·45] deaths, or 14·6% [12·0–17·6] of all male deaths in 2019) followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths (12·2% [11·0–13·4] of all male deaths in 2019), and then high FPG (3·14 million [2·70–4·34] deaths, or 11·1% [8·9–14·1] of all male deaths in 2019).
I also know precisely, because I look how much the delusional "renewable energy will save us" scam costs, because I cared enough to look.
Again, a standard referenced response to pabulum:
Recently I updated the expenditure on so called "renewable energy" as we happily run along trashing huge stretches of wilderness, rendering them into industrial parks to serve the clearly failed rhetoric of anti-nukes.
Source: UNEP/Bloomberg: Global Trends in Renewable Energy.
I manually entered the figures in the bar graph in figure 8 to see how much money we've thrown at this destructive affectation since 2004 (up to 2019): It works out to 3.2633 trillion dollars, more than President Biden has wisely recommended for the improvement of all infrastructure in the entire United States.
Source: UNEP/Bloomberg: Global Trends in Renewable Energy.
I manually entered the figures in the bar graph in figure 8 to see how much money we've thrown at this destructive affectation since 2004 (up to 2019): It works out to 3.2633 trillion dollars, more than President Biden has wisely recommended for the improvement of all infrastructure in the entire United States.
Here's what we have to show for it, from the 2021 issue of the International Energy Agency's Annual World Energy Outlook:
Source: IEA World Energy Outlook, 2021, page 294, Table A1A
I don't know what any of the other members of my awful generation have been doing with their lives, but I spent at least 50 years hearing how wind and solar would save the world. I even used to believe that crap, but I'm done. I work as opposed to chanting 50 year old mantras about the sun and the wind.
What part of 10.4 Exajoules for all the solar and wind facilities on the entire planet, this out of 589 Exajoules consumed by humanity (in a Covid year) after trillions of dollars and decades of mindless chanting, is difficult to understand?
At the awful risk of hearing how noble some old person declares himself because he didn't have children, I do have to look the next generation in the eye. It is not an option for me to fade away in an orgy of self-congratulation.
I give a shit that close to 2 billion people - human beings - on this planet lack basic sanitation while we squander trillions of dollars on so called "renewable energy," tearing the shit out of the pristine wilderness to convert it to industrial parks for wind turbines, all because bourgeois types don't bother to either think or read and/or because these same types think their responsibility ends with repeating popular pabulum.
Excuse me if I am unimpressed with and refuse to acknowlege a demand that I, who has worked and continues to work through challenging issues in the environment, engineering, chemistry, and physics to understand this situation, should just shut up.
I have a right to say what I say and I have a right to criticize the critic if the critic is talking out of his or her ass. I worked for that right. I still work for it. I'm not picking flowers at a retirement home. I'm thinking about the situation with respect to this planet to the last breath, because I give a shit.
OK?
Ted Cruz doesn't get the right to tell anyone to shut up and that what he says cannot be criticized; nor does Donnie Trump; nor does Gym Jordan. Neither do any posters here get to tell me to shut up about topics about which they clearly know nothing at all.
Rather than cheer for unsustainable so called "renewable energy" one could open a science book, or a science paper, if not those I read and link, than some the find for themselves (were they to care). Hell, why not read the news sections at Nature or Science?
Under these circumstances, one could begin, merely begin, the competence to have "doubts" about what other people do and do not know, not that I find these "doubts," to be anything than Dunning Kruger type arrogance:
828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels
As for me, again my journal here speaks for itself. I don't merely pull stuff out of my ass; I produce references and think critically about what's in them.
I work.
Perhaps some of the cheerleaders here for the electric car/wind/solar/gas/coal/petroleum industry, including the connected fantasies, should try it out. They might learn something, but somehow I don't think they're entirely interested in doing so.
It shows.
Have a nice evening.
May 1, 2022
A graphic from it.
Some excerpts:
With due respect to Dr. Mac Dowell, it's quite possible that he may be missing some things, as is the chart above, since both rely on some assumptions about energy as well as carbon sources.
If the carbon is captured from the environment - direct air capture while possibly viable seems from my perspective to be the least likely option, but I hold some respect to dry reforming of some biomass, as well as seawater capture (about which I am currently writing) the carbon cycle is closed and there is no need to dump 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide directly into the atmosphere.
Secondly, there is no mention of metal carbides, nor of carbon fibers, nor any of the highly useful allotropes of carbon, nanotubes and teh like. (I expect metal carbides - steel is, in a sense, an example, although the carbon source is currently coal - to play a big role in any sustainable economy which may exist.
On the first point the article continues a little further on:
This of course, represents energy storage, which is always conducted at a thermodynamic loss. This said, if the storage results from the storage of energy that would otherwise be rejected to the atmosphere - this requires high temperatures and modern refractory materials - it may make sense.
Intriguing is this open sourced paper from open sourced Science Advances: Asmita Jana and Taishan Zhu and Yanming Wang and Jeramie J. Adams and Logan T. Kearney and Amit K. Naskar and Jeffrey C. Grossman and Nicola Ferralis, Atoms to fibers: Identifying novel processing methods in the synthesis of pitch-based carbon fibers. Science Advances , 8, 11,eabn1905, 2022.
This paper discusses the fact that carbon fibers, while extremely useful, currently are 4 times as expensive as aluminum, and details some process details that make it so. The current process begins with the polymerization of acrylonitrile, itself obtained from dangerous fossil fuels in the form of propene and ammonia which is made from hydrogen and nitrogen gas, the bulk of the world's hydrogen in turn also being produced from dangerous fossil fuels.
However a process is known to produce propene from methanol is well known: Yarulina, I., De Wispelaere, K., Bailleul, S. et al. Structure–performance descriptors and the role of Lewis acidity in the methanol-to-propylene process. Nature Chem 10, 804–812 (2018). It is well known that methanol can be synthesized from the hydrogenation of, um, carbon dioxide. (In fact, about 10% of the world's hydrogen, currently is devoted to methanol synthesis, as I noted in another thread: The current sources and uses of hydrogen.) Again, most of the world's hydrogen is currently produced from dangerous fossil fuels, but it is possible to engage in clean hydrogen production utilizing thermochemical water splitting, with a clean primary energy source, of which there is only one, nuclear energy.
From the Science Advances paper, it is clear that another driver of the cost of carbon fibers is heat, and thus high temperature exchange networks theoretically, and likely practically, can be used to reduce this heat cost via high thermodynamic efficiency.
It thus seems conceivable that the cost of carbon fibers may be well significantly released. Nor is the point of the Science Advances paper unworthy of consideration, the management of pitch. Pitch is generally a dangerous fossil fuel product consisting of a highly heterogenous and structurally complex set of molecules falling into a class called "asphaltenes." Much recent work utilizing very high resolution mass spectrometry - that of FT-ICR-MS - has been devoted to understanding the structure of asphaltenes. It is also true that asphaltenes are often a side product of the pyrolysis of biomass, and/or plastic wastes. This suggests yet another route to carbon fibers that depends on carbon dioxide effectively removed from the air. Structural elucidation is the first step on the way to specifications, and specifications define the goals of process chemistry and allow for its development.
I therefore suspect that perhaps, again, it is Dr. Mac Dowell who may be guilty of being disingenuous. With clean, sustainable primary energy - again there is one form and only one form, nuclear energy - carbon utilization in economically viable ways certainly seems promising.
We shall see.
From my perspective carbon dioxide utilization is far superior to carbon dumps. All of our pursuits of addressing climate change have failed, but some are worthy of further evaluation and research and some are not. The article and the chart above have not left me without a sense of some hard won optimism.
The key to this problem is, in my view, materials science, a subject in which a golden age may well emerge. We should hope so.
I trust you will have a nice evening.
A graphic on "making stuff out of CO2" and the time scale of sequestration by "stuff."
This came into my Nature Briefing email some weeks back and I never got around to posting it. The general idea is one of which I'm quite fond, but the graphic calls my enthusiasm in question, at least to some extent.
It's from here: The race to upcycle CO2 into fuels, concrete and more
Subtitle:
Companies are scrambling to turn the greenhouse gas into useful products — but will that slow climate change?
A graphic from it.
Some excerpts:
Tongyezhen is a town with coal in its bones. In this part of China’s Henan province, people have been mining coal and smelting metals for millennia. Today, Tongyezhen hosts a sprawling industrial park where huge ovens bake coal and limestone into coke and lime, both key ingredients for producing steel. Unsurprisingly, it is one of the smoggiest places in China.
It might seem an unlikely venue for a clean-technology milestone. But later this year, a chemical plant here is set to become the world’s largest facility for recycling carbon dioxide into fuel. It will combine CO2 from a lime kiln with excess hydrogen and CO2 from a coking furnace to produce methanol, an industrial chemical used for fuel and to make plastics. Carbon Recycling International (CRI), the Reykjavik-based firm behind the operation, says that the Tongyezhen plant will recycle about 160,000 tonnes of CO2 per year — equivalent to the emissions from tens of thousands of cars — that would otherwise go into the atmosphere.
It’s an alluring idea: industrial CO2 emissions are warming the climate, and many countries are working on capturing the gas and storing it underground. But why not recycle it into products that are both virtuous and profitable? As long as the recycling process avoids creating more carbon emissions — by using renewable energy, or excess resources that would otherwise be wasted — it can reduce the CO2 that industry pumps into the atmosphere and lower the demand for fossil fuels used in manufacturing. That’s a double climate win, proponents say.
This kind of recycling (sometimes called upcycling) is an increasingly crowded field, as companies big and small race to market a bewildering array of products made from CO2. Some are boutique items for the climate-conscious shopper — vodka or diamonds, for example — but most are staples of the global economy: fuels, polymers, other chemicals and building materials. More than 80 firms are working on new approaches to using CO2, noted a 2021 report by Lux Research, a market-research company in Boston, Massachusetts. The market for these products is tiny today, amounting to less than US$1 billion — but Lux predicts that it will grow to $70 billion by 2030, and could reach $550 billion by 2040...
...But there are tough questions about whether CO2 recycling genuinely benefits the climate. Many of the products made this way only briefly delay carbon’s journey into the atmosphere — fuels are burnt, products made from chemicals degrade and the CO2 consumed during their creation is released again. That will happen at Tongyezhen: much of the methanol produced is destined to be burnt as fuel in China’s growing fleet of methanol-powered vehicles.
Meanwhile, some estimates suggest that the global market for recycled CO2 products is unlikely to lock up more than a few per cent of the CO2 that humans release into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, which totalled 36 billion tonnes last year. CRI’s plant, for one, will convert the equivalent of a little over 2 minutes’ worth of annual global CO2 emissions. “We can avoid a lot of that, for a lot less money, than we can by turning CO2 into stuff,” says Niall Mac Dowell, an energy-systems engineer at Imperial College London.
“The assumption that we can fix this climate-change problem in an economically attractive and easy way — at best it’s naive, and at worst it’s actively disingenuous,” he says. It’s an argument that’s heating up as CO2 recycling goes mainstream....
It might seem an unlikely venue for a clean-technology milestone. But later this year, a chemical plant here is set to become the world’s largest facility for recycling carbon dioxide into fuel. It will combine CO2 from a lime kiln with excess hydrogen and CO2 from a coking furnace to produce methanol, an industrial chemical used for fuel and to make plastics. Carbon Recycling International (CRI), the Reykjavik-based firm behind the operation, says that the Tongyezhen plant will recycle about 160,000 tonnes of CO2 per year — equivalent to the emissions from tens of thousands of cars — that would otherwise go into the atmosphere.
It’s an alluring idea: industrial CO2 emissions are warming the climate, and many countries are working on capturing the gas and storing it underground. But why not recycle it into products that are both virtuous and profitable? As long as the recycling process avoids creating more carbon emissions — by using renewable energy, or excess resources that would otherwise be wasted — it can reduce the CO2 that industry pumps into the atmosphere and lower the demand for fossil fuels used in manufacturing. That’s a double climate win, proponents say.
This kind of recycling (sometimes called upcycling) is an increasingly crowded field, as companies big and small race to market a bewildering array of products made from CO2. Some are boutique items for the climate-conscious shopper — vodka or diamonds, for example — but most are staples of the global economy: fuels, polymers, other chemicals and building materials. More than 80 firms are working on new approaches to using CO2, noted a 2021 report by Lux Research, a market-research company in Boston, Massachusetts. The market for these products is tiny today, amounting to less than US$1 billion — but Lux predicts that it will grow to $70 billion by 2030, and could reach $550 billion by 2040...
...But there are tough questions about whether CO2 recycling genuinely benefits the climate. Many of the products made this way only briefly delay carbon’s journey into the atmosphere — fuels are burnt, products made from chemicals degrade and the CO2 consumed during their creation is released again. That will happen at Tongyezhen: much of the methanol produced is destined to be burnt as fuel in China’s growing fleet of methanol-powered vehicles.
Meanwhile, some estimates suggest that the global market for recycled CO2 products is unlikely to lock up more than a few per cent of the CO2 that humans release into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, which totalled 36 billion tonnes last year. CRI’s plant, for one, will convert the equivalent of a little over 2 minutes’ worth of annual global CO2 emissions. “We can avoid a lot of that, for a lot less money, than we can by turning CO2 into stuff,” says Niall Mac Dowell, an energy-systems engineer at Imperial College London.
“The assumption that we can fix this climate-change problem in an economically attractive and easy way — at best it’s naive, and at worst it’s actively disingenuous,” he says. It’s an argument that’s heating up as CO2 recycling goes mainstream....
With due respect to Dr. Mac Dowell, it's quite possible that he may be missing some things, as is the chart above, since both rely on some assumptions about energy as well as carbon sources.
If the carbon is captured from the environment - direct air capture while possibly viable seems from my perspective to be the least likely option, but I hold some respect to dry reforming of some biomass, as well as seawater capture (about which I am currently writing) the carbon cycle is closed and there is no need to dump 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide directly into the atmosphere.
Secondly, there is no mention of metal carbides, nor of carbon fibers, nor any of the highly useful allotropes of carbon, nanotubes and teh like. (I expect metal carbides - steel is, in a sense, an example, although the carbon source is currently coal - to play a big role in any sustainable economy which may exist.
On the first point the article continues a little further on:
Life-cycle arguments
Whether products recycled from industrial CO2 emissions actually protect the climate is unclear — because the CO2 they capture will still be released into the atmosphere if the molecules are burnt or broken down. Drawing CO2 directly from the atmosphere could have clearer climate benefits, but capturing the gas from air is extremely expensive, as are products made that way.
Proponents argue that recycling industrial CO2 into chemicals can reduce emissions in another way — by avoiding some fossil-fuel-based production. “Our process helps keep fossil fuels in the ground by tapping into existing streams of CO2,” a spokesperson for Twelve told Nature.
The stringent way to examine this is through a life-cycle analysis (LCA) — a detailed accounting of the carbon involved in making and using a product, from the origins of its CO2 to its final fate. Many CO2-recycling firms say they have done these audits, but don’t publish them because they contain proprietary information...
Whether products recycled from industrial CO2 emissions actually protect the climate is unclear — because the CO2 they capture will still be released into the atmosphere if the molecules are burnt or broken down. Drawing CO2 directly from the atmosphere could have clearer climate benefits, but capturing the gas from air is extremely expensive, as are products made that way.
Proponents argue that recycling industrial CO2 into chemicals can reduce emissions in another way — by avoiding some fossil-fuel-based production. “Our process helps keep fossil fuels in the ground by tapping into existing streams of CO2,” a spokesperson for Twelve told Nature.
The stringent way to examine this is through a life-cycle analysis (LCA) — a detailed accounting of the carbon involved in making and using a product, from the origins of its CO2 to its final fate. Many CO2-recycling firms say they have done these audits, but don’t publish them because they contain proprietary information...
This of course, represents energy storage, which is always conducted at a thermodynamic loss. This said, if the storage results from the storage of energy that would otherwise be rejected to the atmosphere - this requires high temperatures and modern refractory materials - it may make sense.
Intriguing is this open sourced paper from open sourced Science Advances: Asmita Jana and Taishan Zhu and Yanming Wang and Jeramie J. Adams and Logan T. Kearney and Amit K. Naskar and Jeffrey C. Grossman and Nicola Ferralis, Atoms to fibers: Identifying novel processing methods in the synthesis of pitch-based carbon fibers. Science Advances , 8, 11,eabn1905, 2022.
This paper discusses the fact that carbon fibers, while extremely useful, currently are 4 times as expensive as aluminum, and details some process details that make it so. The current process begins with the polymerization of acrylonitrile, itself obtained from dangerous fossil fuels in the form of propene and ammonia which is made from hydrogen and nitrogen gas, the bulk of the world's hydrogen in turn also being produced from dangerous fossil fuels.
However a process is known to produce propene from methanol is well known: Yarulina, I., De Wispelaere, K., Bailleul, S. et al. Structure–performance descriptors and the role of Lewis acidity in the methanol-to-propylene process. Nature Chem 10, 804–812 (2018). It is well known that methanol can be synthesized from the hydrogenation of, um, carbon dioxide. (In fact, about 10% of the world's hydrogen, currently is devoted to methanol synthesis, as I noted in another thread: The current sources and uses of hydrogen.) Again, most of the world's hydrogen is currently produced from dangerous fossil fuels, but it is possible to engage in clean hydrogen production utilizing thermochemical water splitting, with a clean primary energy source, of which there is only one, nuclear energy.
From the Science Advances paper, it is clear that another driver of the cost of carbon fibers is heat, and thus high temperature exchange networks theoretically, and likely practically, can be used to reduce this heat cost via high thermodynamic efficiency.
It thus seems conceivable that the cost of carbon fibers may be well significantly released. Nor is the point of the Science Advances paper unworthy of consideration, the management of pitch. Pitch is generally a dangerous fossil fuel product consisting of a highly heterogenous and structurally complex set of molecules falling into a class called "asphaltenes." Much recent work utilizing very high resolution mass spectrometry - that of FT-ICR-MS - has been devoted to understanding the structure of asphaltenes. It is also true that asphaltenes are often a side product of the pyrolysis of biomass, and/or plastic wastes. This suggests yet another route to carbon fibers that depends on carbon dioxide effectively removed from the air. Structural elucidation is the first step on the way to specifications, and specifications define the goals of process chemistry and allow for its development.
I therefore suspect that perhaps, again, it is Dr. Mac Dowell who may be guilty of being disingenuous. With clean, sustainable primary energy - again there is one form and only one form, nuclear energy - carbon utilization in economically viable ways certainly seems promising.
We shall see.
From my perspective carbon dioxide utilization is far superior to carbon dumps. All of our pursuits of addressing climate change have failed, but some are worthy of further evaluation and research and some are not. The article and the chart above have not left me without a sense of some hard won optimism.
The key to this problem is, in my view, materials science, a subject in which a golden age may well emerge. We should hope so.
I trust you will have a nice evening.
April 30, 2022
Some excerpts:
In my private studies, I've often perused the table of nuclides - I've always liked the Kaeri site for its simplicity, and ease for finding general things quickly; I use BNL when I want to go deeper - and this graphic is a cool representation of it pointing to the possible rather than the known:
The article states that a similar facility is being built in Germany and was scheduled for completion in 2027; however completion is in doubt because Russian scientists were partners in it and Russian participation has been frozen because an insane government in that country.
Long-awaited accelerator ready to explore origins of elements
This is a news item in Nature; it should be open sourced.
Long-awaited accelerator ready to explore origins of elements
Subtitle:
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams will be the first to produce and analyse hundreds of isotopes crucial to physics.
Some excerpts:
One of nuclear physicists’ top wishes is about to come true. After a decades-long wait, a US$942 million accelerator in Michigan is officially inaugurating on 2 May. Its experiments will chart unexplored regions of the landscape of exotic atomic nuclei and shed light on how stars and supernova explosions create most of the elements in the Universe.
“This project has been the realization of a dream of the whole community in nuclear physics,” says Ani Aprahamian, an experimental nuclear physicist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Kate Jones, who studies nuclear physics at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, agrees. “This is the long-awaited facility for us,” she says.
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing had a budget of $730 million, most of it funded by the US Department of Energy, with a $94.5 million contribution from the state of Michigan. MSU contributed an additional $212 million in various ways, including the land. It replaces an earlier National Science Foundation accelerator, called the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL), at the same site. Construction of FRIB started in 2014 and was completed late last year, “five months early and on budget”, says nuclear physicist Bradley Sherrill, who is FRIB’s science director...
All FRIB experiments will start in the facility’s basement. Atoms of a specific element, typically uranium, will be ionized and sent into a 450-metre-long accelerator that bends like a paper clip to fit inside the 150-metre-long hall. At the end of the pipe, the beam of ions will hit a graphite wheel that spins continuously to avoid overheating any particular spot. Most of the nuclei will pass through the graphite, but a fraction will collide with its carbon nuclei. This causes the uranium nuclei to break up into smaller combinations of protons and neutrons, each a nucleus of a different element and isotope.
This beam of assorted nuclei will then be directed up to a ‘fragment separator’ at ground level. The separator consists of a series of magnets that deflect each nucleus towards the right, each at an angle that depends on its mass and charge. By fine-tuning this process, the FRIB operators will be able to produce a beam consisting entirely of one isotope for each particular experiment...
...Researchers have therefore concocted a variety of simplified models that predict some features of a certain range of nuclei, but might fail or give only approximate estimates outside that range. This applies even to basic questions, such as how fast an isotope decays — its half-life — or whether it can form at all, says Nazarewicz. “If you ask me how many tin isotopes exist, or lead, the answer will be given with a large error bar,” he says. FRIB will be able to synthesize hundreds of previously unobserved isotopes (see ‘Unexplored nuclei’), and by measuring their properties, it will begin to put many nuclear models to the test...
“This project has been the realization of a dream of the whole community in nuclear physics,” says Ani Aprahamian, an experimental nuclear physicist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Kate Jones, who studies nuclear physics at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, agrees. “This is the long-awaited facility for us,” she says.
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing had a budget of $730 million, most of it funded by the US Department of Energy, with a $94.5 million contribution from the state of Michigan. MSU contributed an additional $212 million in various ways, including the land. It replaces an earlier National Science Foundation accelerator, called the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL), at the same site. Construction of FRIB started in 2014 and was completed late last year, “five months early and on budget”, says nuclear physicist Bradley Sherrill, who is FRIB’s science director...
All FRIB experiments will start in the facility’s basement. Atoms of a specific element, typically uranium, will be ionized and sent into a 450-metre-long accelerator that bends like a paper clip to fit inside the 150-metre-long hall. At the end of the pipe, the beam of ions will hit a graphite wheel that spins continuously to avoid overheating any particular spot. Most of the nuclei will pass through the graphite, but a fraction will collide with its carbon nuclei. This causes the uranium nuclei to break up into smaller combinations of protons and neutrons, each a nucleus of a different element and isotope.
This beam of assorted nuclei will then be directed up to a ‘fragment separator’ at ground level. The separator consists of a series of magnets that deflect each nucleus towards the right, each at an angle that depends on its mass and charge. By fine-tuning this process, the FRIB operators will be able to produce a beam consisting entirely of one isotope for each particular experiment...
...Researchers have therefore concocted a variety of simplified models that predict some features of a certain range of nuclei, but might fail or give only approximate estimates outside that range. This applies even to basic questions, such as how fast an isotope decays — its half-life — or whether it can form at all, says Nazarewicz. “If you ask me how many tin isotopes exist, or lead, the answer will be given with a large error bar,” he says. FRIB will be able to synthesize hundreds of previously unobserved isotopes (see ‘Unexplored nuclei’), and by measuring their properties, it will begin to put many nuclear models to the test...
In my private studies, I've often perused the table of nuclides - I've always liked the Kaeri site for its simplicity, and ease for finding general things quickly; I use BNL when I want to go deeper - and this graphic is a cool representation of it pointing to the possible rather than the known:
...Jones and others will be especially keen to study isotopes that have ‘magic’ numbers of protons and neutrons — such as 2, 8, 20, 28 or 50 — that make the structure of the nucleus especially stable because they form complete energy levels (known as shells). Magic isotopes are particularly important because they provide the cleanest tests for the theoretical models. For many years, Jones and her group have studied tin isotopes with progressively fewer neutrons, edging towards tin-100, which has magic numbers of both neutrons and protons.
Theoretical uncertainties also mean that researchers do not yet have a detailed explanation for how all the elements in the periodic table formed. The Big Bang produced essentially only hydrogen and helium; the other chemical elements in the table up to iron and nickel formed mostly through nuclear fusion inside stars. But heavier elements cannot form by fusion. They were forged by other means...
Theoretical uncertainties also mean that researchers do not yet have a detailed explanation for how all the elements in the periodic table formed. The Big Bang produced essentially only hydrogen and helium; the other chemical elements in the table up to iron and nickel formed mostly through nuclear fusion inside stars. But heavier elements cannot form by fusion. They were forged by other means...
The article states that a similar facility is being built in Germany and was scheduled for completion in 2027; however completion is in doubt because Russian scientists were partners in it and Russian participation has been frozen because an insane government in that country.
April 30, 2022
Charpy/Izod impact testing? Really?
Smart ass.
Don't you hate it when the little brats grow up to be smarter than you are?
Nah, I'm proud of him being smarter than his dumb old man, and someday I'll have to ask him what the hell Charpy/Izod impact testing is.
Or else I'll have to look it up.
Little brat...
So I ask my kid a simple question and the little brat lays Charpy/Izod impact testing on me.
I was laying around last night, kind of goofing off, and I came across this paper: Elastic and electronic properties of TcB2 and superhard ReB2: First-principles calculations, Yuan Xu Wang, Appl. Phys. Lett. 91, 101904 (2007).
I'm going through the paper and I get to wondering, in a naïve kind of way, what the relationship between hardness and fracture resistance. So I say to myself, "Self, you could look it up, but it's late and you're supposed to do other things, so why not ask the little brat? He's educated and its easier than looking stuff up."
So I email him.
He emails back:
...Fracture resistance is really a measure of toughness though which depends on both the strength and ductility of the material. Hardness correlates pretty well with yield strength of a material but does not tend to say much about the ductility of the material, so it's somewhat impossible to predict a material's toughness simply from hardness measurements. To measure fracture resistance you would much rather want to perform tensile tests or Charpy/Izod impact testing. For some brittle ceramic materials you can also get some relevant information from 3-point or 4-point bend tests...
Charpy/Izod impact testing? Really?
Smart ass.
Don't you hate it when the little brats grow up to be smarter than you are?
Nah, I'm proud of him being smarter than his dumb old man, and someday I'll have to ask him what the hell Charpy/Izod impact testing is.
Or else I'll have to look it up.
Little brat...
April 30, 2022
The Health of Shanghai, Scientific Instrumentation, and Humans.
My company is supporting research into three different approaches to the treatment of Alzheimer's disease in support of three different companies.
I cannot relate the nature of these approaches, as they represent IP, but a key instrument for one of them, one of two such instruments in our laboratory, has gone down. Our "back up" instrument is already running at full capacity.
To repair the instrument, the company servicing it requires a part that is a semiconductor device. These types of devices used to be made in the US, but the company that supplies the instrument, founded in the "Silicon Valley," and once a titan of American Industry, has outsourced manufacture of this device to China.
Shanghai is under a Covid lockdown, a rather draconian one from what I understand. Thus this device is unavailable. Workers who run the plant are confined to their homes. This widely used scientific instrument is apparently, from my conversation with the company, is down all over the United States.
The particular mechanism for Alzheimer's treatment on which we are working may or may not work. After decades in the industry, although it has been my privilege to help in various ways to bring life saving medications to patients, I'm somewhat jaded when it comes to believing that everything I see is as near to earth shattering as the people working through it might believe; Alzheimer's is a tough nut to crack, and we are only now at the edge of developing reproducible biomarkers for it. Having a biomarker is an indicator that we actually know what the disease is. It appears from some work I've read that it may not be a single disease; like the generic term for the disease "cancer," Alzheimer's may represent a variety diseases under one general heading. Hence the multiple approaches to addressing it.
Yet all scientific teams believe in their work; as well they should. It may be the project that is delayed because we cannot get a part from the closed city of Shanghai might actually represent a real therapy.
I suppose the semiconductor industry moved to China for reasons of cost and - because the semi-conductor industry is anything but "green" no matter how much bullshit is handed out by the solar industry - lax environmental regulations.
The cost however goes beyond money. It goes to human lives. We do ourselves no favor as a culture when we see everything in terms of the "bottom line," because the "bottom line" sometimes leads to the bottom.
April 30, 2022
Excerpts:
I have had to endure several accounts of Russian soldiers being sickened by radiation during the occupation, both in social settings and in news accounts. (But her emails.) While nobody is cheering for Russian thugs, these accounts are nonsense. Scientific staff has been residing at Chernobyl for quite some time, studying the effects of radiation on the wild life which has been reestablished in the park as well as a population of Przewalski's horses introduced to the area to preserve the species which was once extinct in the wild but unlikely be hunted in a region closed to human habitation.
Here, from the same website, IAEA mission at Chernobyl, as anniversary is marked, is a picture of the Director General arriving at the reactor itself to lay a wreath:
Neither he, nor the Ukrainian soldiers with him nor the other staff, look particularly sick.
IAEA Update on the Elevated Radiation Levels at Chernobyl After Russian Occupation.
Zaporozhe 'top concern' for IAEA, Chernobyl radiation levels updateExcerpts:
A damaged external power line has been repaired allowing Zaporozhe to return to previous output levels, Energoatom said. It comes as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) continues efforts to get access to the plant for its inspectors - and outlines the initial results of its radiation monitoring during its mission to Chernobyl...
... The IAEA director general said that the mission to Chernobyl had already proved a success in terms of getting its direct remote monitoring reports reinstated. He also outlined the results of tests of radiation levels (see picture above) which showed that there were elevated radiation levels in the areas of the 'Red Forest' in the Chernobyl exlcusion zone where Russian forces had dug fortifications during their five weeks in control of the area.
However he said that the levels, at the places where they had tested, were still three times below the recommended exposure levels for workers. He said "this is not a place to have a picnic or excavate ... but the situation is not one that could be judged as posing great danger to the environment or to people at the moment that we were taking these measurements."
... The IAEA director general said that the mission to Chernobyl had already proved a success in terms of getting its direct remote monitoring reports reinstated. He also outlined the results of tests of radiation levels (see picture above) which showed that there were elevated radiation levels in the areas of the 'Red Forest' in the Chernobyl exlcusion zone where Russian forces had dug fortifications during their five weeks in control of the area.
However he said that the levels, at the places where they had tested, were still three times below the recommended exposure levels for workers. He said "this is not a place to have a picnic or excavate ... but the situation is not one that could be judged as posing great danger to the environment or to people at the moment that we were taking these measurements."
I have had to endure several accounts of Russian soldiers being sickened by radiation during the occupation, both in social settings and in news accounts. (But her emails.) While nobody is cheering for Russian thugs, these accounts are nonsense. Scientific staff has been residing at Chernobyl for quite some time, studying the effects of radiation on the wild life which has been reestablished in the park as well as a population of Przewalski's horses introduced to the area to preserve the species which was once extinct in the wild but unlikely be hunted in a region closed to human habitation.
Here, from the same website, IAEA mission at Chernobyl, as anniversary is marked, is a picture of the Director General arriving at the reactor itself to lay a wreath:
Neither he, nor the Ukrainian soldiers with him nor the other staff, look particularly sick.
April 29, 2022
Some excerpts:
"With a coordinated approach..."
Um...um...um...
I don't think so.
Of course the melt down of three reactors at Fukushima was far worse than the destruction of the oceans and the destruction of the atmosphere, but not as bad a Chernobyl.
Am I right, or am I right?
"With a coordinated approach..."
Make me laugh...nah...make me cry...it makes no difference.
History, should it exist, will not forgive us.
Science: A Stark Future for Ocean Life, Mass Extinction to Rival the Worst in History.
The perspective is in the current issue of Science: A Stark Future for Ocean Life
MALIN L. PINSKY AND ALEXA FREDSTON SCIENCE • 28 Apr 2022 • Vol 376, Issue 6592 • pp. 452-453
It may be open sourced; I'm not sure.
I haven't had a chance to download and read the "Penn and Deutch" paper this commentary to which this commentary refers, but will do so, and perhaps post some commentary on the full paper here.
I took the "mass extinction" language from the caption of the photo above:
Accelerating ocean warming and deoxygenation threaten a mass extinction rivalling the worst in Earth’s history, especially for cold water species, such as the Atlantic rock crab shown here.
Some excerpts:
The year 2021 marked the highest temperature and likely the lowest oxygen content for the oceans since human records began (1, 2). These changes have put marine species on the front lines of climate change. For example, marine species’ geographical ranges are shifting faster and experiencing more contractions than those of terrestrial species (3, 4). However, whether climate change poses an existential threat to ocean life has been less clear. Marine species are often considered to be more resilient to extinction than terrestrial ones, and human-caused global extinctions of marine species have been relatively rare (5). On page 524 of this issue, Penn and Deutsch (6) present extensive modeling to reveal that runaway climate change would put ocean life on track for a mass extinction rivaling the worst in Earth’s history. Furthermore, they reveal how keeping global warming below an increase of 2°C compared with preindustrial levels could largely prevent these outcomes.
The topic of climate change and species extinction on land has been fraught with controversy. This is in part because of debates over suitable methods of predicting extinctions and in part because of the relatively few documented extinctions to date (7). The marine research community has largely avoided making projections of extinction risk (8), even though experts widely see climate change as a major threat to the global oceans (9). This has left the watery 70% of Earth’s surface as a giant blank spot in the future projection of life on Earth.
Penn and Deutsch modeled suitable habitats for marine species on the basis of well-described physiological processes that link metabolic demand for oxygen to the supply of oxygen to organismal tissues as a function of temperature. As warming causes the demand for oxygen to exceed supply in a given location, survival likely becomes untenable, causing extinctions. The authors calibrated their model against the oceanographic changes they reconstructed for the end-Permian mass extinction event, which was a period of extensive warming and deoxygenation 250 million years ago, colloquially known as the Great Dying. Although not a perfect analog to the current climate situation, the end-Permian mass extinction is one of the most cataclysmic periods in Earth’s history for which there are records of extensive warming and extinction...
...Not too long ago, canaries warned coal miners of toxic gas accumulation. Today, marine life is warning the world of a different and global gas accumulation. Staving off widespread biodiversity loss and the sixth mass extinction is a global priority. Because marine extinctions have not progressed as far as those on land, society has time to turn the tide in favor of ocean life. Exactly where the future falls between the best-case and worst-case scenarios will be determined by the choices that society makes not only about climate change, but also about habitat destruction, overfishing, and coastal pollution. With a coordinated approach that tackles multiple threats, ocean life as we know it has the best chance of surviving this century and far beyond.
The topic of climate change and species extinction on land has been fraught with controversy. This is in part because of debates over suitable methods of predicting extinctions and in part because of the relatively few documented extinctions to date (7). The marine research community has largely avoided making projections of extinction risk (8), even though experts widely see climate change as a major threat to the global oceans (9). This has left the watery 70% of Earth’s surface as a giant blank spot in the future projection of life on Earth.
Penn and Deutsch modeled suitable habitats for marine species on the basis of well-described physiological processes that link metabolic demand for oxygen to the supply of oxygen to organismal tissues as a function of temperature. As warming causes the demand for oxygen to exceed supply in a given location, survival likely becomes untenable, causing extinctions. The authors calibrated their model against the oceanographic changes they reconstructed for the end-Permian mass extinction event, which was a period of extensive warming and deoxygenation 250 million years ago, colloquially known as the Great Dying. Although not a perfect analog to the current climate situation, the end-Permian mass extinction is one of the most cataclysmic periods in Earth’s history for which there are records of extensive warming and extinction...
...Not too long ago, canaries warned coal miners of toxic gas accumulation. Today, marine life is warning the world of a different and global gas accumulation. Staving off widespread biodiversity loss and the sixth mass extinction is a global priority. Because marine extinctions have not progressed as far as those on land, society has time to turn the tide in favor of ocean life. Exactly where the future falls between the best-case and worst-case scenarios will be determined by the choices that society makes not only about climate change, but also about habitat destruction, overfishing, and coastal pollution. With a coordinated approach that tackles multiple threats, ocean life as we know it has the best chance of surviving this century and far beyond.
"With a coordinated approach..."
Um...um...um...
I don't think so.
Of course the melt down of three reactors at Fukushima was far worse than the destruction of the oceans and the destruction of the atmosphere, but not as bad a Chernobyl.
Am I right, or am I right?
"With a coordinated approach..."
Make me laugh...nah...make me cry...it makes no difference.
History, should it exist, will not forgive us.
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Gender: MaleCurrent location: New Jersey
Member since: 2002
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